Kira, a boring woman, accidentally becomes Venom, and then there are aliens. Here’s the plot of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars: It’s the future. And by now, there’s no reason to cut him any slack any longer, as he’s a grown-ass man writing what is supposed to be a grown-ass book for grown-ass audiences. But I was convinced he was bored with the setting by the time that series ended, and the afterword to this book more or less completely confirms that suspicion. That was, like, the guy’s entire hook- that he was super young and yet he’d written this big ol’ book. A lot of Eragon’s sins got forgiven because Paolini was nineteen when the book came out and he’d started writing it at fifteen. But To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is annoying in such a specific way that I couldn’t pass it up: this is the most arrogant book I’ve ever read, and the arrogance is so utterly unearned that it’s kind of shocking. And I generally don’t write reviews of books I didn’t like. I’ve read a good number of objectively worse books this year. I admit it I bought it because I was morbidly curious about it. And then Paolini didn’t release another book for, like, nine years until this one appeared on the shelves. I liked Eragon a lot when I read it the first time and by the end of the series I was completely done with it. This is, in case you don’t know, the guy behind the “Inheritance Cycle,” the series of books that started with Eragon and got longer and shittier with each successive book. Before you even open the book, you know the main thing you need to know: Christopher Paolini is super fucking important. If I had bought the book from a bookstore, I very well might have put it back on the shelf, because this offends me to a degree that I’m honestly kind of surprised by. This is the only book I own that does not have the name of the book on the spine. Books by people far more important and far more successful than Christopher Paolini. It is a massive book.Īnd the spine, which Amazon tells me is 1.74 inches wide, features the word PAOLINI on it in the largest font possible and nothing else other than the publisher’s mark. Now, understand this: Stars is eight hundred and twenty-five pages of story with another 53 pages of (utterly unnecessary) appendices, a glossary, a timeline, and author’s notes tacked onto the end. Seriously, stare at it for a while it’s probably the best thing about the book. I’ll start with something positive: take a look at that cover, and bask in its gorgeousness for a moment. Gird your loins and adjust your expectations as necessary, because this is going to end up more as a review of Christopher Paolini than a review of his new book.
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